Last week, I shared how I defined Social Media goals for ECWT, my client. In this post, I will describe the indicators I selected to measure the success of ECWT’s Social Media efforts.

Just like in any marketing or business plan, establishing “Key Performance Indicators” (KPIs) are essential to see if your Social Media strategy is going into the right direction or if you need to implement some changes.

Such indicators have to be attainable and timebound, which means you have to be realistic with the targets you want to achieve on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis. For each of ECWT’s Social Media goals [1], I have established a different set of indicators and metrics:

1. KPIs for measuring increased traffic to ECWT’s website

Because my client wants to know if the implementation of Social Media has a measurable effect on the website’s traffic, I decided to include an indicator that compares ECWT’s website traffic with the traffic the year before, when no Social Media activity was yet taking place. The (Google Analytics) metrics I decided to compare are:

Visits

Unique Visitors

% of First Time Visitors

To find out if the overall traffic is increasing over time, I decided to compare the above metrics also monthly and quarterly.

I also want to know how much the traffic coming from Social Media is increasing over time, so I will create a segment in Google Analytics [2] to compare that type of traffic through the same metrics mentioned above.

Finally, I also want to know if the proportion of referral traffic coming from Social Media is growing in the overall traffic, so I will also follow up this proportion over time (again through the same metrics).

Different indicators are being used to measure the success of Social Media efforts. They can be grouped with the following labels [3]:

Measuring exposure (or fanbase):How many people are exposed to our Social Media communications?
The metrics to measure are called a little different, depending on the chosen Social Media channel:

Fans (Facebook page), Followers (Twitter, LinkedIn company page, Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr), People you have in Circles (Google+) and Subscribers (YouTube channel).

Measuring impressions (or reach):How many people saw our Social Media communications?
Impressions can only be measured on Facebook and YouTube, and somehow (aproximately) also on Twitter:

Reach: the number of people who saw any of the posts on a Facebook Page in a given time frame (daily, weekly or monthly) [4]

Facebook Page Views statistics

Unique Page Views: total views a Facebook Page receives in a given time frame, calculating only one page impression per user per session [5]

Views: the number of times a video has been played on YouTube (cumulative over time)

Clicks: the number of clicks a Tweet receives on Twitter

Measuring impact (or engagement):What did people do after seeing our Social Media communications?
Above indicators are good for measuring the potential of our Social Media efforts, but that’s where it stops. The real success of Social Media is measured by another set of metrics that measure the engagement of the people following, liking, circling, subscribing or viewing us. The following rates have gained a lot of support among Social Media analysts [6]: